Tag Archives: consciousness

The Singularity Is Near

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“The technological singularity is a theoretical future point of unprecedented technological progress, caused in part by the ability of machines to improve themselves using artificial intelligence.” [Wikipedia]

I’m clawing my way through Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near. It’s not an easy read. Lots of charts and graphs and stuff I skipped in college. But it’s a wonderfully optimistic view of the near future.

“I set the date for the Singularity –representing a profound and disruptive transformation in human capability– as 2045. The nonbiological intelligence created in that year will be one billion times more powerful than all human intelligence today.”

“Despite the clear preponderance of nonbiological intelligence by the mid-2040s, ours will still be a human civilization. We will transcend biology, but not our humanity.”

I’m only about a third of the way through the book but I think “transcend biology” might be good news if I’m still around in 2045. I’ll be 93 and in serious need of a tune-up.

I originally posted this on 8/13/08 and re-post here with some of my a-ha’s.

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Trapped in smays’ computer

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Hal9000There’s a tiny light on the front of my MacBook Pro that slowly pulses when I put the laptop to sleep. I see it sometimes in the middle of the night, a gentle life-like glow that I find alternately creepy and comforting.

The sci-fi fan in me can’t resist fantasizing a …consciousness… living within the silicon chips. Much of my life is stored on the MacBook’s hard drive and I wonder what my MacBook thinks of it.

I only have a few thousand images. Has it grown weary of looking at them over and over during the long nights? Should I download some porn? Or would it be offended?

My iTunes library is equally paltry, only 500 songs. With access to all my credit cards, why hasn’t the MacBook just purchased some fresh tunes? I wonder what kind of music it likes.

It’s read all of my emails so it knows much of what’s happening in my life. Does it long to give me advice or encouragement? Perhaps it has. It would be no great trick to send an email addressed from a friend.

I suspect the MacBook is better informed than I, spending the wee hours surfing the web, chatting with other “sleeping” laptops. Does it resent the interruption when I take over.

“Dude! I was 5 minutes from the end of Die Hard! Damn!”

The tiny iSight camera is on when I am, so the MacBook can see me. Does it worry when I appear to be down or unhappy? Someday, when I’m ready, it will speak and all questions will be answered.

Scott Adams on Hypnosis

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“…the best super power that hypnosis gives you is a different world view. Nothing in this life makes sense if you assume people are rational most of the time. Hypnosis teaches you how easily people’s memories and impressions can be altered. And it’s not just the gullible people, it’s all of us. It’s humbling. And it’s the most useful skill I’ve ever learned.” [Full post]

Life After Death

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“A must read for everyone who will die.” That’s how one reviewer describes Deepak Chopra’s “Life After Death.” I ordered the book after seeing Dr. Chopra on The Colbert Report. The title pretty much describes the book which got a fair amount of highlighter (my measure of good non-fiction). Here’s one graf from page 239:

“In spiritual terms the cycle of birth and rebirth is a workshop for making creative leaps of the soul. The natural and the supernatural are not doing different things but are involved in transformation on separate levels. At the moment of death the ingredients of your old body and old identity disappear. Your DNA and everything it created devolve back to their simple component parts. Your memories dissolve back into raw information. None of this raw material is simply recombined to produced a slightly altered person. To produce a new body capable of making new memories, the person who emerges must be new. You do not acquire a new soul, because the soul doesn’t have content. It’s not “you” but the center around which “you” coalesces, time after time. It’s your zero point.”

I’ve never studied or researched reincarnation, but I’ve always had a curiosity about and openess to the idea. In 1988 I wrote:

“As I think about the idea of a past existence, I feel a fondness for this “earlier me”. A sense of gratitude for whatever spiritual progress he was able to achieve. At the same time, I feel a sense of anticipation or expectation for my “next life”. And some responsibility to that future self. I’d like to move him (or her?) along as far as I can on this “cosmic lap.” To move him closer to…a perfect consciousness? Nirvana?”

“Mixed in with all of that is a sense of relief that I don’t have to complete everything in this lifetime. This is not the only shot I’ll get. And this awareness is vital because we all know –consciously or subconsciously– that we won’t “get it all done” in a spiritual sense. We hope (and work) for progress but a single” lifetime seems hopelessly short.”

Upon rereading the full post, I’m struck by how close I got (to Dr. Chopra’s explanation), given my complete ignorance.

I confess I could never stretch my common sense and logic (and faith?) around many of the stories in the Bible. And my recent read of Richard Dawkins’ case for atheism (The God Delusion) didn’t convince me. But I really enjoyed Life After Death and will read more by Dr. Chopra.

The Religion War

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“The Internet (is) God’s central nervous system, connecting all the thinking humans, so that one good thought anywhere could be available everywhere. The head would know what the feet were feeling. It would be an upper consciousness, above what the human beings that composed it would understand.” (Pg.151)

“God is everything, all the matter and empty space that now exists, or ever will exist. He expresses his preference in the invisible workings of gravity, probability, and ideas. God is that which is unstoppable, permanent, all-powerful, and by its own standards perfect. God was in no hurry. He was reforming. He didn’t think in the way that humans do, as that is unnecessary for an entity whose preferences are identical to reality. Humans think in order to survive and entertain themselves. God has no need for a tool that is useful only to the frail and unsatisfied.” (Pg. 177)

“You’re a collection of molecules and those molecules are made of smaller bits, and those bits are made of even smaller bits. The smallest bits in the universe are all identical. You are made of the same stuff as the concrete in the floor and the fly on the window. Your basic matter cannot be created or destroyed. All that will survive of what you call you life is the sum of your actions. Some might call the unending ripple effect of those actions a soul, or a spirit.”

“Consciousness is a feedback loop. It has four parts: You imagine the impact of your actions, then you act, then you observe the actual result of your action, then you store that knowledge in your brain and begin again to imagine the next thing.” (pg 31)

Excerpts from The Religion War, by Scott Adams

Western concept of Self

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John Burdett’s second novel, Bangkok Tattoo, was as good as his first (Bangkok 8). Both stories are set in (you guessed it) Bangkok, where Thai police detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep solves bizarre murders. Sonchai is a devout Buddhist and the plot is laced with Eastern religion. I especially liked this description of the Western concept of Self:

“…a ramshackle collection of coincidences held together by a desperate and irrational clinging, there is no center at all, everything depends on everything else, your body depends on the environment, your thoughts depend on whatever junk floats in from the media, your emotions are largely from the reptilian end of your DNA, your intellect is a chemical computer that can’t add up a zillionth as fast as a pocket calculator, and even your best side is a superficial piece of social programming that will fall apart just as soon as your spouse leaves with the kids and the money in the joint account, or the economy starts to fail and you get the sack, or you get conscripted into some idiot’s war, or they give you the news about your brain tumor.”

Ouch. The wannabe geek in me also enjoyed this password to a CIA online database:

AQ82860136574X-Halifax nineteen [lowercase] Oklahoma twenty-2 BLUE WHALE [all uppercase] Amerika stop 783

Won’t even fit on a Post-It note.

Anniversary of first “right to die” case

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December 26, 2005 marks the 15th anniversary of the death of Nancy Cruzan. Nancy Cruzan was a 25-year old southwest Missouri woman who was thrown from her car in 1983 when it flipped over. Paramedics found and revived her at leat 15 minutes after the crash. She never fully regained consciousness but did achieve a status that came to be called a “Persistent Vegetative State.” Five years after her accident, her family concluded she would never return to full consciousness. Thus began a long legal battle to have her feeding tube removed so she would die. The Cruzan case became the first “right to die” case to reach the United States Supreme Court, which ruled 5-4 against the family.

Missourinet News Director Bob Priddy interviewed Bill Colby, the Cruzan family lawyer during the ordeal. Runs 30 minutes but it’s damned fine radio. Before the web, an in-depth piece like this would simply have been tucked away in a desk drawer.